Sublime

Milan had been ravaged in the early 1480s by three years of the bubonic plague, which killed close to one-third of its inhabitants. With his scientific instincts, Leonardo realized that the plague was spread by unsanitary conditions and that the health of the citizens was related to the health of their city. He did not focus on marginal improvement

Botticelli, whose workshop turned out devotional Madonnas at a faster clip than even Verrocchio’s, was seven years older than Leonardo and had won far greater patronage from the Medici. He was good at courting such favor.

And then there was Salai. He was designated to get the other half of the vineyard. Since he was already living there and had built a house on a portion of the land, it would be hard for Leonardo to have done otherwise with the property. But that was all Salai was bequeathed in the will. There had apparently been an estrangement, one that had grown

The culmination of Leonardo’s collaborations with Verrocchio came in the mid-1470s with the completion of the Baptism of Christ, which shows John the Baptist pouring water over Jesus while two angels kneeling beside the River Jordan watch (fig. 10). Leonardo painted the radiant, turning angel on the far left of the scene, and Verrocchio was so awed

Florence’s festive culture was spiced by the ability to inspire those with creative minds to combine ideas from disparate disciplines. In narrow streets, cloth dyers worked next to goldbeaters next to lens crafters, and during their breaks they went to the piazza to engage in animated discussions. At the Pollaiuolo workshop, anatomy was being studi

Abstraction faite de l’enthousiasme de ses biographes du XVIe siècle, il est évident que Léonard était un jeune homme aimable, agréable à regarder et entouré d’amis. « Il était d’une disposition si affable qu’il s’attirait l’affection de tous », précise Vasari.

What made Vitruvius’s work appealing to Leonardo and Francesco was that it gave concrete expression to an analogy that went back to Plato and the ancients, one that had become a defining metaphor of Renaissance humanism: the relationship between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the earth. This analogy was a foundation for the treatise that

Leonardo was always on the lookout for powerful patrons, and in 1513, with Milan still controlled by his former patrons the Sforzas, a new one appeared in Rome. In March of that year, Giovanni de’ Medici was elected to become Pope Leo X. The son of Lorenzo “the Magnificent” de’ Medici, the Florentine ruler who was a halfhearted patron to Leonardo a